Begging for Understanding

Published
4:00 am PST, Monday, March 6, 2000

THE CALIFORNIA Supreme Court ruling last week making it easier for cities to ban aggressive panhandling is a decision that most believe was bound to be, sooner or later. After all, nobody likes to be accosted on the street by the rude and disheveled, awash in an air of entitlement, demanding our alms and attention.

The urge is to push them aside, at least metaphorically, and continue on to wherever we intended. Now, by a vote of 5 to 2, the state's highest court has said that is, to varying degees, exactly what our municipalities can do without violating free-speech protections.

Specifically, the ruling grants cities the right to regulate the solicitation of funds. But it could have broad impact because it allows for restrictions on charitable donations, political contributions, homeless newspaper peddlers and, most certainly, the dreaded aggressive panhandlers too.

Nonetheless, it has been endorsed by a dozen cities with wide-ranging, often conflicting, social ideologies, from Berkeley to Santa Cruz. And other cities, including San Francisco, have repeatedly attempted to enact ordinances of their own to blunt street beggars, channeling them away from banks, airports and, in some cases, entire sections of town.

So even though the ruling was perhaps inevitable in light of the scary sidewalk gauntlets that seem to spring from nowhere, still it emits a whiff of intolerance, a hint of callousness of a society eschewing deeds of mercy.

It also skates dangerously close to the hallowed thin line between freedom and repression. As dissenting Justice Joyce Kennard noted, free speech means little unless it protects what we find to be offensive and annoying.

And all of this brings to mind an old TV ad with the late actor John Wayne soliciting for a charity, pointing out that the appeal for help could have been the other way around.

As civil libertarians caution against banning panhandling outright, let's hope that the cities temper their glee with a touch of compassion and use the court ruling wisely.